


Reprieve

by Mairyn



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: F/M, Female Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Hurt/Comfort, Oral Sex, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 14:29:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20292991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mairyn/pseuds/Mairyn
Summary: “When the pain took you,” he said at last, his voice low, “I… I felt you.” She watched him, waiting patiently for him to finish, and was surprised to notice his cheeks had colored slightly. “The first thing I touch in a hundred years and,” he finally looked up, his eyes meeting her own, “it’s you.”





	Reprieve

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone else who needed a semi-slow burn Ardbert fic with a healthy dose of kissing the ghost man.

_ We did  _ ** _everything_ ** _ right, everything that was asked of us, and still--still it came to this! You of all people should understand. We cannot--we  _ ** _will_ ** _ not falter. We brought our world to the brink of destruction and now we must save it. _

When all had gone quiet and the battle in Ahm Areng was won, the Warrior of Light returned to her suite in the Pendants. She should rest: eat dinner, bathe, and sleep as well as she could before the Scions departed once again in the morning. The Light Warden had nearly done her in and now persistent pain crackled in the pit of her stomach; it was low and it was seemingly harmless, but it was ever present. She should be worrying after herself. Yet it was absence that instead claimed her attention. Ardbert had made himself scarce for the extent of her latest journey and though she was hesitant to admit it, she’d begun to worry. His understanding and partnership became the rope to which she desperately clung as she carved her path through Norvrandt: a voice to echo the confusion and frustration and unending fear that bloomed in tandem with being looked upon as the savior of worlds.

Even back in the Source, when they first encountered one another as enemies, Ardbert’s plight and failure in the face of impossible odds plucked an empathetic chord. He was the embodiment of her worst fears; he knew the icy scorn of a world seemingly left to perish by those they called heroes and could do little to alleviate their grief save waiting and watching and hoping someone might one day correct the Flood brought about by his own hands.

More-so than Norvrandt, she privately found herself wanting to save him most of all.

Ardbert waited by the window of her inn room as she stepped inside. His back was turned to her, his gaze seemingly trained on the darkened night sky. Even having known both day and night the extent of her life, the stars were no less dazzling as a replacement for the luminous clouds which once held the dark at bay. She was nearly done. Only Kholusia remained. And then… Well. They would cross that bridge when they came to it.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” she said gently, suddenly aware of how tired she sounded.

Ardbert turned to look at her and she could see in his eyes that he was tired, too. The corner of his mouth quirked in a sly grin. “Sometimes the dead would rather not be disturbed.”

They stood for a moment in silence, before she crossed the short distance between them and joined him in gazing out the window. The night was clear and cloudless. A full moon illuminated Lakeland’s violet foliage, granting its expanse an ethereal glimmer. Was this what Mor Dhona might’ve looked like, had the Calamity not claimed it? The hot glow of light in her stomach steeled her. She would not let that fate befall the First.

“We’re nearly there,” she whispered to herself. 

“After so many years left to wander,” Ardbert agreed, “I can scarce believe my eyes at times.” She glanced back at him and was relieved to see a quiet contentment in his expression. He was tired, but he was happy. She’d done well by him. “What of Ahm Areng?”

The flickering of pain in her stomach had hidden her hunger for some time, but she knew she needed to eat and bathe before she rested for the night. As she settled into the dinner of meats, cheeses, and fruit the inn staff had left for her, she recounted her progress in the desert wasteland: the trolly, the well, the Light Warden. She quietly neglected to mention the pain she’d felt and the way it swept through every inch of her body like lightning. If Ardbert knew anything of it, he made no comment.

Rather, he reacted to her news regarding Minfilia’s disappearance as she’d assumed he would, and felt a twinge of sharp regret. Ardbert folded his arms and looked off into the corner of the room, eyes empty. “So the reason I must suffer this purgatory shall forever remain a mystery.”

She was uncertain how to respond. Ardbert had lived in a hell of Minfilia’s creation for so long now… Surely-- _ surely _ \--she wouldn’t do such a thing without reason. But any meaning she could divine from Minfilia’s decision bore no clarity. They would simply have to wait, and see, and hope for the best. Ardbert deserved more than an eternity of drifting through what remained of the world he failed to save.

Just as she began to speak, her words were cut off by a jagged eruption within her, sudden and without prompting. She cried out and collapsed forward from the stool on which she’d been perched, grasping at her chest in an effort to pull the scattered pieces of her aether back together again.

Shrieking, searing, shattering; a soul-deep burning exploding from every pore, entrenching her body in unbearable and unrelenting agony. Perhaps she’d tumbled over the cusp of too much to withstand after all. The pain she’d felt after absorbing the Light Warden’s power in Ahm Areng, she now realized, may well have been her death toll. Vision gone white, she sank still closer to the floor, breaths coming in desperate heaves as she tried to still the fury. She’d seen this before, with Tesleen and too many others since her arrival in Norvrandt. 

She was turning. She couldn’t let that happen.

As seemed too often necessary, she emptied her mind and attempted to reach inside herself, to tap the final reserves of fortitude shadowed within her. It was there, entrenched, but only just: so far away and yet... If she could only reach out and grasp it...

Just beyond her vision, she heard Ardbert shout and drop to his knees beside her. The cold inn room floor beneath her hands had nigh on vanished. She concentrated all her efforts on breathing and reaching. Reaching for that last beacon of hope. Something brushed her shoulder--fingertips, a gentle jolt--and in that moment she found what she was searching for. She tore herself back from the precipice and, bit by bit, the world around her was restored.

When at last her vision had returned to normal, she looked up to find Ardbert standing over her, examining his hands as though he’d never seen them before. Was he what had touched her? When all else passed through his fingertips like mist: was their bond somehow powerful enough for such a thing? She couldn’t be certain. Ardbert’s eyes met her own.

“What… what just happened?” he asked, utterly perplexed.

She bit the inside of her lip to manage the lingering pain and began lifting herself from the floor and back onto one of the stools beside her suite’s dining table. For another moment she simply breathed, and considered whether she should admit her plight. Ardbert was an intelligent man. He could and likely did watch her every move. There was no sense in hiding this from him. He’d figure it out eventually.

“The Light is… becoming too much to bear,” she admitted. Ardbert only nodded, solemn, and listened patiently. She shifted, releasing the vice-like grip she held on her shirt. “I’m trying my best, but the Light Warden in Ahm Areng… It was…  _ different _ , this time.”

She saw his fingers twitch, as if considering, before he settled back into himself.

“You scared me,” he said, the barest hint of desperation creeping from behind his words. “If it’d been more serious, I couldn’t...”

There was affection and concern in his eyes, and a flame of a different sort ignited in her belly before she quickly extinguished it. She couldn’t risk having thoughts like that now. Possibly not ever. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch him: to reassure him. If her fingers passed through him… If he hadn’t been what touched her… She wasn’t certain she could bear it.

“I’m sorry,” she said instead, voice low. “Someone has to bear the burden. If it isn’t me…” She shook her head. “There’s naught to be done about it. All we can do is push forward.”

Ardbert’s concern did not vanish, but he made no protest. He knew she was right, whether he liked it or not. “Aye. No more letting it get the better of you though, yeah? You nearly burned me. When I touched you, I--”

A knock at the door startled them both, drawing her attention away, and when she turned back to Ardbert, he was already gone.  _ When I touched you _ . So she hadn’t imagined it, then. Something allowed her to be the sole individual who could see, hear, and now  _ feel  _ him. Two souls bound together by circumstance. For an instant, she imagined touching his face; brushing her fingertips across his weary flesh. But she dismissed them quickly. Not now, and not ever.

* * *

After the Exarch departed, she stood in her still-sandy boots for only a moment before deciding it was time for a bath. The desert, as ever, had coated her in a thin sheen of filth and though she’d washed her face and hands to cleanliness upon her return to the Crystarium, the rest of her desperately needed a good scrub. She’d used the public baths in the Pendants’ basement from time to time during her stay, and so she once again made her way out of her room and down the stairs, still a bit rattled from the storm of pain she’d experienced only minutes before.

What would happen when she faced the Light Warden of Kholusia? She’d taken in too much light already. Even a drop more, much less a Light Warden’s worth, would like as not kill her. Only moments ago the Exarch had begged her to come out of this alive and she promised she would. But could she truly? Privately--always and only privately--she wasn’t certain.

She pulled open the door to the baths and was immediately hit by a burst of warm, humid air. Deep natural springs existed here, warmed artificially and supplied with practical soaps and towels for individual use. It was more public than she liked and far less lavish than the showers she’d bathed in during her visit to Eulmore, but practical in the way the Crystarium prided itself in. Given that it was fairly late at night, the area was abandoned and dim candlelight cast shadows over the water. A single attendant carrying a pile of used towels nodded politely at her and continued outside, leaving her alone to do as she pleased.

Once she’d stripped out of her clothing and neatly bundled it to carry back with her later, she headed to the water with soap and towel in hand and slipped in, immediately sighing quietly at the soothing wash of warm water against her weary muscles. These moments of peace, as Ardbert once told her, were the ones she, too, cherished most: the quiet after the storm. 

She trailed a hand down her outstretched arm, wiping away droplets of warm water. Ardbert had  _ touched  _ her. Despite the frightening circumstances of the moment, something in her marveled at that. Their connection ran deeper than she’d yet realized: somewhere in the grand scheme of eternity, beyond worlds and beyond understanding, their very souls seemed to match. It was as if Hydaelyn herself (if indeed Hydaelyn was still to be trusted) bound them together as opposite sides of the same coin.

Had things been different... In another world… As she scrubbed her flesh clean, she allowed herself to ponder--just for an instant--what such a thing might have been like.

Anyone pressed might agree that Ardbert was a handsome man: deep blue eyes and a mop of boyishly unkempt brown hair, with powerful arms built by years of swinging a thirty-pound axe like it was little more than a trifle. But more powerful still was his heart: the unrelenting good and commitment to helping others she saw bound within him. Even after so much suffering… Still. Still he was willing to save his world. Admirable, by anyone’s standards. A hero without parallel. They were the traits she couldn’t reach within herself, when exhaustion buried her and the world seemed a cruel and unforgiving place. 

All that said, her attraction wasn’t freed from the superficial. She held no doubt he could lift her with ease; toss her over his shoulder and carry her to bed. Pin her to the wall and break her down, bit by bit, with lips and hands and tongue, bringing her to peaks of passion she hadn’t yet experienced. Her body nearly glowed with arousal, too powerful to quell.

_ Curse the Twelve _ . She scoured her skin quickly, turning her thoughts to the water and the slight citrus smell of her soap. Her stomach yet burned, but she felt as though she’d contained it for the time being. As for the  _ other  _ burning...

“Enjoying yourself?” the voice of the man himself startled her and she instantly dropped further into the darkened water, cheeks flushed bright red. Everything below her shoulders had been obscured from the moment she stepped in; his presence wasn’t necessarily unwelcome or intrusive. She simply felt guilty for the turn her thoughts had taken.

“Privately, I had hoped,” she called back, embarrassed beyond words.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, calm as ever. She thought she spied a slightly taunting smirk on his lips, but couldn’t be certain through the shadows. He added, “When you’re finished. Meet me in your suite.”

Quickly as he’d arrived, Ardbert was gone and her arousal shifted to the pulse of strange anticipation. Something in the way he spoke beckoned her. Challenged her. She thought to call him back, but didn’t. It was foolish to think anything might happen between them, given the circumstances. He was, for all the world but herself, a ghost. 

A ghost, but a man all the same. Alive and in pain; in desperate need of companionship, as she herself so often was.

When she’d finished washing herself clean, she wrapped herself in the cotton robe she’d carried down from her inn room and made her way back, dirty clothes in hand. She shivered against the chill of night. Her wet hair did little to help her maintain warmth. The furnace had blissfully heated her inn room to a pleasant temperature and she locked the door behind her, placing her dirty clothes in the hamper to be washed. Ardbert materialized before her by ilms, as if uncertain.

“Hello,” she said, lamely.

His eyes scanned her face curiously. “Feeling better?”

She swallowed against the sudden lump in her throat. “Much.”

A strange silence brewed between them. The crackling pain that’d taken her twice now hadn’t yet returned, but she felt uncomfortable with the quiet: as though it was only a matter of seconds before she once again collapsed. Only a matter of seconds before this moment--whatever it was--was once again lost. Ardbert rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly.

“When the pain took you,” he said at last, his voice low, “I… I felt you.” She watched him, waiting patiently for him to finish, and was surprised to notice his cheeks had colored slightly. “The first thing I touch in a hundred years and,” he finally looked up, his eyes meeting her own, “it’s you.”

“I felt it too.” She resisted the urge to shuffle her feet. His gaze seemed to bore into her, reading every twitch of her expression. She felt naked. “When you touched me… I didn’t think it was possible.”

A wash of relief flooded his expression. She wanted to touch him then, more than anything.

“I was cursed to wander eternal,”Ardbert said in that far-away voice betraying too many years spent alone. “But perhaps Minfilia did grant me one shred of relief.”

The warrior’s gloves had vanished. He reached out, slowly, and brushed his fingertips against her cheek as if touching crystal. She leaned into the smooth, tender caress and her heart thundered. She needed this. Desperately. She reached up and grabbed his wrist, stroking her thumb across the sensitive flesh just below his palm. 

“You have to succeed,” he urged. His attention shifted to the window and he stared out into the illuminated night. She stared after him. “For all of us. I can’t face another eternity like this, and neither can they.”

A moment’s quiet stretched between them, privately contemplative. 

“What if I fail?” she asked. She wasn’t teasing. She’d carried the fear with her since the burdens of Eorzea first began falling upon her shoulders. She didn’t often allow herself to wonder at the possibility. “What if I can’t do it?”

Ardbert turned back to her and scanned her expression before pulling her into a gentle embrace. She collapsed into his arms gratefully, still surprised by his warmth and solidity. He was real, gods help her. He buried his nose in her hair and murmured, “We can’t afford to think like that.”

She made no motion to pull away. His armor was cool against her forehead and she breathed in the smell of leather. It’d been too long since she’d been held like this. Years since she’d allowed herself the comfort of another person’s touch. Ardbert continued to cradle her in his arms and said nothing. His hand smoothed along her still-damp hair.

After a long while she loosened her grip and stepped back. Ardbert smiled shyly and her heart swelled with affection.

“Thank you,” she said, genuinely.

He parted his lips to speak for a moment, but quickly closed them. He seemed embarrassed. She was also feeling a bit flustered. But the moment was here. She wasn’t going to let it pass her by, even if the words froze on her lips.

She leaned in and kissed him. 

Ardbert froze beneath her, shoulders stiff in her tentative grip. His lips didn’t move. She worried she’d made a mistake and backed away, rushing to apologize, but he quickly cradled the back of her head and reeled her in again. He kissed her in earnest, warm and gentle and affectionate, but desperate too, his free hand pressing into her lower back and holding her against him. She sighed, bliss awash to the very tips of her toes.

They kissed for some time, individually coming to understand the circumstances of this change in their previously platonic bond. It wasn’t lust or even love that propelled them. It was something more powerful. An opportunity for restoration, perhaps.

She huffed a soft laugh when at last they parted and stroked his cheek softly, fingertips scraping across his stubble during their descent. She felt bared to the world despite her robe. She wanted his hands on her. She wanted to feel him—the truth of him—beneath the layers of armor he steadfastly wore.

“I want this,” she promised, simply.

Ardbert grinned. “Happy to oblige.”

And then he lifted her: right up off the floor and onto his shoulder, just like she’d imagined. She kicked her legs and laughed as he hauled her to her bed, setting her down carefully and planting a kiss on the stretch of skin just below her ear. A tingle travelled down the side of her neck.

“Eager, are you?” she teased.

“More than you yet realize,” he assured her, voice husky.

Ardbert pressed her back into the sheets and his lips were upon hers once more. His hands began drifting towards the tied belt of her robe, but she stopped him, pecking his lips once to show no ill intent. He pushed himself back an ilm and raised an eyebrow in confusion.

“This is a bit unfair isn’t it?” she tapped on his breastplate with a fingernail, a hollow clink ringing out as she did so.

“Ah, right,” he lamented. He straightened himself out entirely, one knee still on the bed while his other foot rested on the floor, and said, “Let me just…”

In an instant, he was naked. Head to toe, not a sock left to hide his body from view. Nothing but the tanned and scarred expanse of a warrior’s build left to greet her. He was so beautiful her mouth nearly watered. If she could help it, her hands and lips would explore every inch of him by night’s end. From the look on his face, he seemed to be thinking the same.

With an eager noise, she pulled him down and switched their positions, leaving him lying against the sheets with her perched over him, still clothed in her robe. His erect cock stood between them as a testament to his interest, and she slowly began untying her robe, keeping it wrapped carefully around her body even as the undone belt fell to either side. She shrugged off the shoulders, doing her best to give him a little show, and he laughed.

“You’d starve a man this way?” he complained good-naturedly.

She let the robe drop, bearing her body to him in full. Only an instant later her pulled her down to kiss her once again, and the endless expanse of their flesh met at last: skin to skin, heart to heart, soul to soul. No scrap of fabric to impede their joining. She reached between them and took his length hand, smiling when he gasped against her lips.

“It’s been too long,” he murmured. 

She kissed her way down the side of his neck to his collarbone and lower: tracing all the pieces of him she desired most. Her hands smoothed across the firm bulk of his biceps, the tight muscles of his abdomen, the trail of hair leading from his navel to his cock. She kissed his nipples, his scars, the soft flesh at his sides. All the while his hands gripped her shoulders and he sighed quietly. A relief, no doubt, to be touched again. When she’d had her fill she gazed up at him from between his legs and waited until he nodded, flushed with heat and anticipation.

The first tentative lick drew a gasp from his lips unlike anything she’d heard. She kissed the head, teasing gently with her tongue, before taking him in entirely, sucking long and carefully, ensconcing what she couldn’t manage in her hand. It’d been a long time since she’d done something like this: allowed a man to use her in this way, giving herself freely. She felt him straining to not move his hips too eagerly as she bobbed her head; he was being as respectful as possible. When at last she learned an appropriate rhythm, he moaned in mindless pleasure and wrapped the length of her hair between long, calloused fingers. She let out a small noise when he tugged, just once, teasing.

She tended to him in this way for as long as he could bear. But when he began to reach the precipice, he slowly pushed her away.

“I don’t want this to end yet,” he said, breathless. She wiped her lips. “I’d rather it happen together.” She smiled at that. He sat up and turned her over. “Let me give you a turn.”

She settled back into the sheets while Ardbert hovered over her. His eyes catalogued her every feature as if committing them to memory. He smoothed his hand down her chest, cupping her left breast and rolling her already-hardened nipple between his fingertips, smiling when she moaned softly. Fingertips were soon replaced by the warm lave of his tongue and nibble of his teeth: not hard enough to hurt, just enough to provide a spark of sensation. He was quite plainly no stranger to intimacy. Despite a hundred years of celibacy, he seemed to have retained a trick or two from his days adventuring. His now-free hand traveled southward, slipping smoothly between her legs, and he slicked two fingers in circles over the most sensitive part of her, drawing an insistent noise from her lips.

It came as no surprise when his mouth began travelling lower as well. He seemed eager to serve her: to draw every ounce of pleasure from her being that he possibly could. His hands parted her legs and he scooted further down the bed to accommodate, drawing her knees apart and bearing her body to his eyes alone. The tender line of kisses he trailed down the inside of her thigh lit a fire in her body she could scarcely control. She resisted the urge to close her knees around him; the slow, methodical nature of his actions was torturous, but so very sweet. He pressed his lips against her heat in an exploratory kiss, his beard tickling her sensitive flesh, then gave her clit a firm and certain lick. She gasped, unprepared for the immediate intensity of sensation.

Her reaction was enough to propel him forward and he set to licking and sucking like a man driven by stoking the flame within her and setting her ablaze. It was too much already from the moment it began. When his fingers joined the mix, two of them dipping gently inside her, she threw her head back and groaned aloud as if she’d been wounded. The wash of pleasure swept through her like crashing waves, consuming her entirely before abating again, ilm by ilm. Closer and closer to the edge, but not quite reaching it. She felt herself coiling inside, growing tighter and tighter, and though she wanted nothing more than to give in and crest the wave entirely, she pushed him back and drew him upwards, kissing his lips and savoring the taste of herself she found there.

“I need you,” she whimpered, body electric. “Take me.”

She spread her legs wide, shameless, and watched as he knelt between them, taking his cock in hand and lining himself up at her entrance, pressing inside the tiniest bit before he leaned back down to give her a long and lingering kiss. Her hands travelled down his back, fingers catching on old scars, learning the paths he’d traveled through sensation alone, before she gripped his ass and helped him to finally thrust inside, claiming her entirely. She sighed gratefully. She was so blinded by her fullness that she nearly missed his expression of divine pleasure: eyes closed, features soft, body waiting and savoring for only a moment before he began to move.

They quickly reached a frantic pace. They’d starved themselves of one another for too long already. Ardbert drove into her quickly, but evenly, drawing the pleasure out of her with his every motion. She locked her legs behind his back, ankles crossed, fingers buried in the mess of his hair, kissing his neck, his chest, his lips blindly as he panted and sighed above her, his thrusts becoming more erratic as the end drew nearer. They were nearly there when she opened her eyes and stared into his own certainly, and felt the expanse of their union draw out between them like some fated cosmic event, all consuming and blinding in its power.

“Ardbert,” she spoke, like a blessing.

Their end came swiftly. She cried out, locking her legs even tighter around him and he buried himself to the hilt, panting hard against her neck as she pressed her fingertips into his back so hard she later feared she might leave bruises. He was quick to follow, whimpering as his hips stuttered an instant, and they collapsed together, sated and exhausted.

It was a long while before she fully returned to her senses. When at last she did, she gave Ardbert another long and lingering kiss, hoping desperately to express what she could not find words for. Their union was not built to last. Ardbert was a man lost already and no doubt the end of all things would claim him. They each had a fate to which they owed their lives and the whole of their devotion. 

But for the moment, at least, reprieve hung above them like the stars in the night sky.


End file.
